This needs to be an odd number of rows / columns if you want the line to be central; additionally, an increased number of rows or columns will result in a smaller incline. Next, draw a transparent rectangle across the middle grid square:

I’m not saying the is the best, most efficient, or only way of doing this. However, it does mean that I can do it on both Windows Phone and Windows Store (and in WPF if I were so inclined) using a single shared project.

This is pretty much my first try on Android. I’ve downloaded tools in the past… and even faced one or two of the problems below, but I’ve never really stuck with it and actually run anything. The reason it reads like I don’t know what I’m doing and just flailing around in the dark is because I don’t and I am.

Software

In the past, the Android system has seemed to me, as a Visual Studio Developer, a little scattered. This is definitely still the case, but now less so. Android Studio seems to be the first step into a “download and run” system… but that is still a way off.

Steps

The first thing to do is to download Android Studio. Create a new project and build. You may get none of the following issues, but if you do, then this is how I got around them.

This appears to be answered by this question. The problem was definitely the same one; when I compiled, I get this error:

After creating a new AVD like the Nexus One above, ironically, Android Studio advises you to use x86. So I did… and got this error:

But it’s already installed:

Weirdly, “Installed” is a misnomer; it doesn’t mean “installed”, it means… err… “not installed”. The way to properly install it is to go to the “extras” directory in explorer and run the installer from there:

I then got this error:

Okay – so this error is caused because you apparently can’t run Hyper-V and the HAXM emulator at the same time. I didn’t want to disable Hyper-V and, having tried several work-arounds, came to the conclusion that whatever the speed implications of not using the HAXM emulator, it was not as bad as having to reboot my machine to switch dev environments. So, I moved to ARM EABI-v7A:

This is my second go at this post, because I originally wrote it on the basis that we would introduce an actual timer into the game. On reflection, I decided against this for two reasons:
1. Timers are a difficult concept (this is aimed at teaching children to program).
2. We’re already using a rapidly iterating infinite loop, so why not use that.

Since we’re not using a timer, we’ll need to replicate a small amount of the timer functionality; Main currently looks like this:

That’s it; Not exactly a ‘game’ yet – but still it looks the part. In the next and final post in this series I’ll add collision detection and keep score. I’ve uploaded this to GitHub in the same way as I did with the Snake game. Find it here.

I’ve written a series of posts based on teaching programming to children (specifically my 9 year old children). Currently, we’ve managed to produce a snake game, but we’re also working on a “Catch” game. This is a game whereby things drop from the top of the game screen, and the player must “Catch” them.

Before starting, it’s worth refering back to my first post for the basis of the game.

The initial set-up is the same; the difference for this game will mainly be that the player can only either move left, or right: